This article explores the effect of perceptions of rural life upon the subsequent actions of counterurbanisers and the resulting impact for rural economic development in the contrasting counties of Cornwall and Northumberland. Perceptions of a high quality of life attract migrants to remote rural areas yet these areas also have high rates of economic deprivation. In-migration can stimulate rural development but in this article we hypothesise that the effectiveness of counterurbanisers as catalysts for economic development depends upon their attitudes towards the receiving community. If rural represents a slow pace of life and a step away from the pressures of modern, urban, lifestyles, counterurbanisers are unlikely to bring the dynamism to rural communities. By contrast, counterurbanisers that understand and engage with the local community are better placed to introduce new forms of human and social capital and provide valuable connections beyond the local area. Building on more endogenous development approaches, a greater understanding of the integration and economic activity of counterurbanisers can guide rural policies and highlight the significance of external representations for peripheral rural areas.

Recently scholars have started to consider the persistence of peripheries in relation to how they are represented by others outside of the region. Drawing on Foucauldian knowledge/power processes and forms of ‘internal colonialism’, powerful core regions construct and reconstruct knowledge about peripheries as a weaker ‘other’. However this denies agency to passive, peripheral ‘victims’, compromising their capacity to contest their peripherality. We challenge this using Deleuze and Guattari's assemblages and the concepts of affect and perception to develop a conceptualisation of power which allows agency to weaker entities. This enables us to develop better tools for improving peripheral development. We use an innovative Public Engagement research method and a case‐study of Cornwall in the South West of the UK to consider an alternative model with regards to how ideas become accepted and adopted. We claim that analyses of the relationships between core and peripheral regions need to understand the complex cultural assemblages behind regional identities, because this helps us to explore the sites of possibility which offer space for development.

Within the context of the devolution process in England, Cornwall and the North-East stand out in contrasting comparison. The North-East was given the opportunity to vote for a regional assembly, which it rejected in 2004, while the strong popular movement for an assembly in Cornwall was ignored by central government.This is reflected in the literature on the English question and regionalism in the UK, which focuses on the example of the North-East, and largely overlooks the grassroots support in Cornwall and the opportunities for understanding regionalism that this could provide. In this article, we explore why this might be the case, developing a comparison between the two areas in the context of the campaigns for setting up directly elected assemblies.We look at the territorial status of the two areas, how the respective campaigns were organised, the types of group involved, the motives that were driving activists, and each region's political significance to Labour. We find central control of the political agenda to be a key issue behind the failure of English regionalism.The process of devolution in the UK has an asymmetrical nature, and while Scotland and Wales have been granted forms of political devolution, England still remains the gaping hole in the settlement (Hazell, 2006).The English devolution project begun by New Labour in 1997 aimed at addressing such a vacuum. However, the plan has now effectively been killed off with the coalition government planning to dismantle not only the Regional Development Agencies but also the Government Offices of the Regions. Yet the fate of English devolution could have been different if the first referendum for an elected level of regional government had passed successfully. Instead, in 2004, the people of the North-East region of England rejected having an elected regional assembly and, in so doing, initiated the chain of events that would see the demise of this latest round in the programme of English regional devolution. However, in 2001, the people of Cornwall launched a popular petition asking Westminster to grant an assembly to an area that was administratively a county of England. In spite of this, the desire for devolution in Cornwall has been widely overlooked both by policy makers and academic literature. In this article we look at the territorial status of the two areas, and compare and contrast the assembly campaigns in the North-East and Cornwall to try and understand why emphasis was placed on a region that would come to reject the option, meaning that further devolved governance in Britain would leave the agenda for the foreseeable future. Such analysis challenges the stream of academic literature that considers England to be a homogeneous unit.We use'identity'in this context to indicate ideas that have resonance with how people popularly understand and situate themselves.In the first part, we find that most of the literature on English devolution focuses on the North-East, overlooking the strong movement for devolved governance in Cornwall.This bs_bs_b...

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This article uses critical political theories to engage with regional economic development as a site of exclusion, inequality and interwoven power relationships, which would benefit from theoretical analysis. It does this through the concept of lifestyle from regional development creative industries discourses and regional branding, considering how time operates in the narratives of place used to represent and promote a region to the outside world. Using Cornwall as a case study and an analysis informed by complexity theory, the article claims that regional narratives need to be understood not just for how they are produced and what they say, but also for the futures that they imply. It argues that while strategic development narratives need to be situated within an affective assemblage that resonates with popular perceptions of place, they also need to have a narrative that opens up spaces of possibility for future action and facilitates adaptation.